Zoran Upscaler Chip Bridges HD DVD Gap

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Zoran Corp. announced its first upscaler chip for DVD players on Wednesday, which was shipped to OEMs earlier this year, company executives said.

The HDXtreme DVD upscaler will create a new generation of DVD players that will be able to upsample DVD content onto high-definition displays, according to Levy Gerzberg, president and chief executive of Zoran, in an interview. A reference design based on the new upscaler and Zoran’s Vaddis DVD decoder is complete and mass production quantities are shipping to major DVD player manufacturers.

DTV sales in the U.S. continue to grow, with approximately 1.39 million units sold during the first quarter of 2004, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The problem, according to Gerzberg, is that the source video stored on millions of DVDs is being displayed in standard-quality format on high-definition displays.

“If you display DVD video content on HDTV screen you’re not taking advantage of the HDTV screen,” Gerzberg said. “We’ve decided to close the gap: [to] take the output of DVD and upscale it to HD.”

The HDXtreme chip could bridge the gap between the standard-definition video stored on today’s DVDs and next-generation high-definition DVD formats, such as Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Although the formats are currently being debated, studio owners have yet to decide which format they will bless as the vehicle for high-definition content.

Zoran’s chips are usually used in low-cost DVD players, ranging from under $150 to even under $100 in a few cases. Gerzberg said he anticipates that the players designed around his chips won’t vary dramatically from that price, although he expects the HD upscaling capability to create a “new tier” of end-user products.

The chip can also be used to display high-definition images stored on a digital camera whose quality is also wasted on standard-definition displays, Gerzberg said.

The chips can output video in either analog format or use the new High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), a video transmission standard supported by Hitachi, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Philips, Sony, Thomson (RCA), Toshiba, and Silicon Image, among others.